明德

Asking the right questions >>> having the right answers

@aakashgupta what are alternative methods for cooling and rejuvenating an overheated nervous system?

This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one. A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty. But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding. The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted. The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.

what if we stop telling them what to think or do? what if we only provide context and ask questions (what, why, how) until we can see the truth in them? could we then set them free? what would this demand of us? does this work with LLMs? humans? ourselves?

i have become middle manager orchestrator of agents

@agi2asi you're probably right I do think that native Chinese speakers use English differently than native English speakers do, and they may occasionally use Chinese I wonder if that manifests in the behavior of LLMs whatsoever

@tannerbraden Overwhelmingly

is it true that some of the most significant contributors to frontier LLMs are Chinese-English bilinguals? if so, might it be true that Chinese-English bilingual prompts might elicit the best results from these LLMS?

learning stop giving attention to what other people say I should do for my health and instead listen to what my body is telling me it needs

@agi2asi oh hell yeah, now we're cooking 👨🏻‍🍳

If I may: I'd recommend asking a LLM app like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini (whichever one you've had the most conversations with) something like: "Your task is to go through all of our prior conversations and determine what I've been most passionate about that could also translate into something I could build as a software solution. Take your time and find me at least 3 valuable ideas I might be missing, then research them in great depth to determine whether PMF is even remotely possible. If it is, guide me through an initial brainstorming session covering said idea(s). The output of your response must be a well-cited report providing the passion(s), evidence, PMF analysis, and an initial brainstorming outline for me to fill in. Do not give me any project proposals that are already oversaturated in the markets - unless they're saturated in markets very distant from my current location. Do not confuse my work projects with my passions unless I explicitly mentioned that I loved said work projects." 🧡

don't ask your AI agent "help me build an app to make money". ask it "help me identify problems in my own life that we can build an app to solve."

it's the good ol' "scratch your own itch" mentality

you'll find it surprisingly difficult to build something that you'll actually want to use yourself. but once you do, it's likely that others will too

all these people need is the love, acceptance, and compassionate listening from people that are in a place of inner peace and self-assurance

I think this is the maladaptive mindset underlying woke culture. "I'm insecure, so your authenticity triggers a fear response in me. I don't know how to handle that, so I'm going to try to shame, manipulate and control you so I can feel better about myself."

if someone is offended by you behaving authentically, it says more about their insecurity than about you if they were self-assured and acting from a place of inner peace, they'd just choose to avoid you instead of freaking out and trying to control you

@samuel_spitz attempted to start a podcast about this a while back: open.spotify.com/show/2T2l75QxI…

@samuel_spitz these are just arbitrary words we choose to try to conceptualize complex patterns I've found the neurodivergence/autism/masking framework to be very effective at self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-improvement

Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m: 1) not autistic, and just pretending to be autistic 2) Or actually autistic and pretending to be not autistic

@agi2asi good to stay grounded! looks like a beautiful drive, glad to see you taking time for yourself.

Sharing some non AI related content cause every now and then, touching grass, or in this case asphalt, is pretty damn great

some of the top people I choose to heed right now: @naval @amasad Alan Watts @ByronKatie @karpathy

be careful who you choose to heed never choose to heed anyone completely

for the record, I genuinely love, accept and have compassion for my father. I don't blame or resent him. he was just unlucky that the generational cycle of control via shame wasn't broken earlier.

big parenting unlock this morning realized that I fell into an old pattern of using shame to react to my son's misbehavior apologized to him, explained that my dad used shame to try to control me and that I'm trying to unlearn that, to become a father that uses love, compassion, and persuasion instead told him that the word for the feeling he experienced is shame, and that the next time he feels shame as I'm parenting him he can tell me "dad, you're shaming me" to help me snap out of it really hope to break this generational cycle of control via shaming, and start a new generational cycle of persuasion via love

don’t stop asking “why?” until you reach the point of “I don’t know”